Hungry City: Salt & Fat in Sunnyside, Queens

The restaurant is on Queens Boulevard in Sunnyside, Queens, by the No. 7 train tracks.

Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

April 25, 2013

Hungry City

By LIGAYA MISHAN

The steamed buns look familiar, snow white and spongy, mouths propped open around thick cuts of pork belly candy-striped with fat. But we are far from the East Village dens of Baohaus and Momofuku, in Sunnyside, Queens, where Salt & Fat sits by the No. 7 train tracks. Here the meat in the buns is slab bacon, with the customary American adornments (lettuce, tomato) and a slather of what is immediately identifiable, even in highly evolved form, as special sauce, evoking not so much a Big Mac as your best childhood memory of it.

Note that the sauce is boosted with sriracha, togarashi and tobanjan (fermented bean paste). Daniel Yi, the 28-year-old chef and owner, was born in Seoul, grew up in Sunnyside and its eastern neighbor, Woodside (both home to sizable Asian communities), and honed his craft at Riingo and Sapa, where the accents were, respectively, Japanese and Vietnamese. He describes his cooking at Salt & Fat, which opened two years ago, as New American, and in a sense it is exactly, exultingly that: the food of the new America, in which immigrants companionably raid one another’s larders.

I would call it, more specifically, Asian-American, which should not be confused with fusion. Exotic ingredients aren’t being co-opted and sublimated; they’re not thought of as exotic in the first place. If you grow up eating hot dogs with rice, and pizza with kimchi, why not introduce sambal to meatballs, pair a classic French duck breast with litchis, and steep oxtail in dashi before compressing it into a wondrous terrine?

Consider the fried chicken, which is mostly Southern, brined in salt and sugar, soaked in buttermilk, dredged in an ornery mixture of flour, cayenne and paprika, and served with ranch dressing. The plate also comes with pickled daikon, a traditional sidekick to Korean fried chicken. (You might wish the skin yielded more crackle, in the Korean style.)

Before frying, the chicken takes a sous-vide bath, to lock in juiciness. This goes unheralded on the menu, as does the alchemy of turning bacon fat into a fluffy white powder resembling crumbled feta. There is a disarming lack of boastfulness here, which seems in keeping with the juxtaposition of pleasures rarefied and primal, as when an egg, poached for 45 minutes at 145 degrees, is presented quaking atop a torchon of pork trotter that has been breaded in panko and deep-fried.

The meal begins with paper bags of popcorn popped in rendered bacon fat and ends with tiny bottles of Yakult, a digestive fermented-milk tonic. But not every dish is hellbent on living up to the restaurant’s name. Hunks of lobster overlay crescents of grapefruit and orange and a grove of frisée; airy, slightly sour cassava chips, a cousin to prawn crackers, are used to spoon up yellowtail tartare that is muddled, at your discretion, with nori-sesame dust, yuzu gel and more of that essential sriracha-togarashi-tobanjan mayo.

There are misjudgments, like a plate of scallops that would be better off without a butterscotchy stroke of maple-carrot purée. A kimchi of whole apple slices does little to mitigate the flabbiness of roasted pork belly. And desserts are oddly white-on-white Suprematist compositions: Rice Krispies and marshmallow ice cream, yuzu buttermilk sorbet and litchi panna cotta oversweetened with plum vinegar gastrique. I would like to forget the unfortunately literal bubble-gum ice cream.

Aside from a pig motif (a pink bank here, brass bookends there), much of Salt & Fat’s décor is a holdover from the space’s previous tenant, a Korean restaurant specializing in “well-being cuisine”: rock-fireplace veneer, disembodied mantelpieces, curvy-armed sconces and aspiring chandeliers. The capacity crowd doesn’t seem to mind the hodgepodge, nor the music thwacking above, often growing louder and janglier as the night goes on.

It is not always comfortable, but it feels right, to be sitting here with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs raining down, harking to the yowl of their frontwoman, Karen O., herself born in South Korea, raised in New Jersey and now living on a planet all her own.